topic Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years? in ArcGIS Pro Questions

Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

_____ — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 14:16:45 GMT

I've been using ArcMap for as long as I can because it actually works, but I know it's being retired next year. I figured Pro would have a lot of improvements since I last tried to use it, but it's exactly as I remember... a buggy, unusable mess. All I'm doing is dragging a field over to the end of the attribute table and it crashes every single time (video attached).

Unbelievable... actually not at all, at this point I just expect it.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

JohnGuilfoyle — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 03:17:04 GMT

Same here.
I do Network Analyst Routing, and rather than making the process better than ArcMap, ArcPro has eliminated some of the most fundamental aspects of what I do. The Network Analyst window would allow me to drag and drop or cut and paste to resequence Stops in a Route, but now it must be done manually.
There are no useful training materials or videos.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

Luke_Pinner — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 04:04:30 GMT

My experience is the opposite.

I used to dread having to open the horribly unstable and agonisingly slow mess that was ArcMap whenever I needed certain functionality that hadn't (at the time) been added to ArcGIS Pro which I find fast and stable.

I don't have any workflows that ArcMap could do better (or at all) now though, unlike John with Network Analyst, so I now no longer have ArcMap installed and do not miss it in the slightest.

I don't know why ArcMap was so slow and unstable for me, probably because of our IT environment/database/system/network at the time and the add-ins that were installed (mix of python and .net add-ins). I suspect the python add-ins were a big contributing factor with the crashiness.

So my point is don't just blame Pro (or ArcMap in my case), look at the environment it's running in as well.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

SimonSchütte_ct — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 06:39:14 GMT

Some workflows may be user specific. Did you create an idea for this functionality? Something like drag and drop functionality is usually implemented quite fast once the dev team is aware that it is something that is missing. You can link the idea here and we´ll give it an upvote.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

SimonSchütte_ct — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 07:02:10 GMT

I worked with ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro when the first ArcGIS Pro release came out.
At the beginning ArcGIS Pro was missing most of the features and GP-Tools I needed at the time were not yet migrated to Pro, so I used both. I did not open ArcMap in the last 4 years and I don´t miss it. There were constant crashes and I cannot count the number of hours of lost work because of a sudden crash of ArcMap.
Now I barely remember the last time ArcGIS Pro crashed on me.

ArcGIS Pro has been providing the functional scope of ArcMap for some time now. There may be some workflows that need to be adjusted to what one did in ArcMap and yes, you will find bugs from time to time.
The bugs we can report and many of them get fixed with the next update.
And a big plus for ArcGIS Pro: thanks to the auto-backup the loss of data/work is kept to a minimum if it does crash. With ArcMap everything that was not saved was lost for good.

Regarding performance: most ArcMap users run ArcGIS Pro on the same old computer they used ArcMap for, expecting the same performance and barely meet the minimum requirements of ArcGIS Pro. Try running ArcGIS Pro on a machine with the recommended system prerequisites.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

ChrisUnderwood — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:18:08 GMT

Hello @_____ , is that the current 3.4.3 version of ArcGIS Pro or a much earlier one ?

With a reproducible case like this, Esri's Support should be able to work out why this is happening for you. Certainly just dragging a Field like that should not crash it, and indeed it does not for me.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

David_McRitchie — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 11:11:37 GMT

Crashes are frustrating, but this shouldn't be normal.

Immediate thoughts would be is this data specific or does this crash with new data?

Are we used networked folders or onedrive? If so do we get the same issue when working with a local filegeodatabase.

From this we can have a clearer idea if the issue will be more specific to the installation, data, environment or a potential software issue.

Hope that helps,

David

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

_____ — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 14:08:35 GMT

*GASP* No way, that can't be!

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

_____ — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:21:26 GMT

I'm definitely blaming Pro.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

_____ — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 14:42:45 GMT

"The bugs we can report and many of them get fixed with the next update."

I don't believe that for one second. That hasn't been my experience, or any other persons experience that I know. In fact, it's a meme online how terrible Esri is at doing bug fixes in a timely manner.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

MarcoBoeringa — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 20:14:10 GMT

@_____ wrote:
"The bugs we can report and many of them get fixed with the next update."
I don't believe that for one second. That hasn't been my experience, or any other persons experience that I know. In fact, it's a meme online how terrible Esri is at doing bug fixes in a timely manner.

I do think this quote hits on one important aspect of the issue raised here: ESRI rarely if ever backports bugfixes to the previous major release.

This causes major issues, as it means that, even if a bugfix is introduced "in the next release" (which I agree with you is definitely not a given, and lots of recognized bugs are only fixed after maybe two or three major releases - which is 2-3 years), it may well end up in a version of ArcGIS with a new bug affecting the same functionality.

If that sounds improbable: I have a tool that heavily relies on the Maplex label engine. When ESRI made some major changes to Maplex in ArcMap 10.3 and if I remember well Pro 1.4, I was confronted with unusable labeling results. Reporting back confirmed the issue, and a bugfix was introduced in the next major release, only to introduce a new major issue! I finally had to wait until ArcMap 10.6 and Pro 1.6 for the Maplex labelling engine to be fully sorted out and give proper results...

Best software practices regarding bugfixes require fixes to be backported to previous releases, at the very least the last major release cycle. A fix for an issue in Pro 3.4 should not require upgrading to Pro 3.5, but also be in the Pro 3.4.x cycle.

If you don't do that, you end up with a potentially perpetually broken product, as each new release also inevitably introduces new bugs, and the version users actually use (often the last major one), never gets fixed properly to the extent of being really usable.

I really think if ESRI sorted out the way they handle these issues and dramatically reduce their bugfix backlog, both ESRI support employees and users would see a dramatic drop in the time needed to deal with issues, as rather than seeing the same - unfixed - issue pop-up for the tenth time in the support process, support employees and users would only primarily have to deal with true new issues. There is so much wasted time in the current process, that ultimately also holds back developers and waists their, as some repeated issues will ultimately make it on their plate as well.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

JohnGuilfoyle — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 20:27:09 GMT

"Crashes are frustrating, but this shouldn't be normal."

I've got nine Error Reports from crashes in the last two days in ArcPro on a brand new machine bought to run this software. Crashes are extremely normal. I add a Point Barrier to a Network Analyst route, and it shuts down. I add a Line Barrier, and it shuts down. I draw a line in a Line Feature Class Layer, and it crashes.

I've had many over the years, sent in the reports, and I have never heard back from Esri about any of them.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

JohnGuilfoyle — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 03:34:08 GMT

The Quintessence of Programming and Debugging:

https://xkcd.com/1739

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

JesseCloutier — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 14:34:04 GMT

Our team would like to share a general reminder in this thread that members are expected to adhere to the Esri Community Guidelines, which require that all users demonstrate respect for each other and our solution-oriented environment by keeping their posts positive and comments constructive. In short, everyone in the Community is expected to follow our platform’s guiding principles: "Be Helpful. Be Human. Be Smart." Thank you to all those who preserve and enact those values. If there are any questions, feel encouraged to Direct Message me or email our team at esricommunity@esri.com.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

BarryNorthey — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:19:07 GMT

The MVP tag is offered to people who voluntarily participate in esri forums and have achieved and maintain a flow of solutions and kudos. The esri tag is assigned to esri employees.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

BarryNorthey — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 16:53:28 GMT

I have admin privileges on my home PC and use a personal use license so I can and do install upgrades as soon as they are available; no problem. This was not possible in my prior workplace that adopted the "managed desktop" software delivery approach in which every upgrade had to be "bundled" for delivery to desktops, whenever IT got in the mood. No one doing the bundling had any knowledge of GIS so I had to write out instructions for them back in the ArcMap days. It was also difficult bordering on impossible to get users to do routine maintenance on their bloating MXDs using the Document Defragmenter utility or to compact their fGDBs.

Our environment was designed for Microsoft Office. It was not designed to handle a complex package like ArcGIS that had frequent updates. Our network was not able to handle large spatial datasets but many datasets were force delivered that way causing processing delays and crashes. We even had to duke it out with IT to get decent (non standard) PCs for our higher end GIS analysts.

In other words, there are many factors that can impact the GIS experience including the ability to keep current. A bug fix is only useful if you can install it. Software is often the culprit but I suspect that there are others in the mix depending on one's work environment.

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

HowardWalter — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 16:06:19 GMT

I totally agree. I just don't get why it's so popular. As a newbie, I tried sharing a CHM to use in Field Maps, but it doesn't show. According to ArcGis help, a data type isn't supported in Field Maps. But they don't explain which are and are not supported. What a piece of....

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

mbandziukas — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 21:41:41 GMT

To Simon Schutte ct, count yourself lucky. The other day, ArcGIS Pro crashed on me every 5 minutes or so, as I was doing some basic table editing. I've been through our IT and networking people and all claim there is nothing amiss. I have no idea what's going on. Yesterday it took 20 minutes to complete a "calculate field" with only 75k records. The program is so slow sometimes that by time I finish watching the little blue dots run across the screen I've forgotten what I was doing. Making a join is agonizing; the dialog box keeps changing the join table and join field entries by itself. I have to keep checking before I hit run that I have the parameters I want. It chokes on trying to use a definition query and a join at the same time. And you cant do a custom sort on a target table field and a join table field, which I used to do all the time for a certain work flow. This is all just basic stuff. I'm also having a lot of trouble with scripts that used to work. Maybe it's a python2/python3 thing. I need to find the time to figure all that out. I never once had these problems with ArcMap. Miss ArcMap so much. sorry for venting. but it felt good.

Oh, and to whoever above is trying to drag a field across the table and having it crash. every. time. Yes, me too. You have to move the fields in the Add Field table. This program requires wild guessing as to what might possibly work. Sometimes you find it. Good luck to all .....

Re: Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

Dark — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 02:40:18 GMT

Actual joke software.